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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (53962)	8/23/2009 2:27:24 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	4 Recommendations Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 217769

"Reader's Digest" was not simply a collection of articles from other publications. The articles were re-written at a 5th grade educational level designed to make the material available to even the poorly educated, with paragraphs missing or rewritten from the source articles which did not support their particular alternate reality. This augmented the selection bias of the articles chosen. Readers Digest lied by omission. The cultural rebellion of the late 1960s was in many ways a repudiation of the false image of reality portrayed by "Reader's Digest". A magazine which portrays a similar "sensible", simplistic, alternate reality is "The Economist" whose content predictably finds itself in ready agreement with the current needs of the Rothschild Bank who is their major shareholder. As these needs change over time, it's not surprising that the "obvious solution" peddled by "The Economist" today is contradictory to their "obvious solution of 18 months ago. Yet "The Economist" has never been wrong and or admitted to changing their opinion. In short you always need to ask what viewpoint generated what you read. When I worked for Chevron I was occasionally surprised to see a "press information kit" I wrote published as "news" under the name of a journalist I did not know, often with the addition of a poorly written paragraph as an intro. Obviously publicists are paid to do this full-time. I also find it increasingly amusing to see how frequently headlines and article titles do not match the material of the article. "Strength in Home Sales Forecast a Strong Economy" trumpets the headline, written by the editor to "balance the article", please advertisers, or "generate sales of the publication". Meanwhile the article relates the increased rate of foreclosures and their sale at record low prices. But it's a mistake to make a leap to your own alternate reality filled with global international conspiracies. Each of these parties have own competing agendas. Humans do have a tendency to mimic each other, which we could call isopraxis, resulting in similar stories in various news sources, but this is not the result of a grand design. The word isopraxis (Greek iso-, "same"; Greek praxis, "behavior") was introduced by the neuroanatomist Paul D. MacLean, who first used it in print in 1975. Examples include a. the simultaneous head-nodding of lizards, b. the group gobbling of turkeys, and c. the synchronous preening of birds. In human beings, isopraxism "is manifested in the hand-clapping of a theater audience and, on a larger scale, in historical mass migrations, in mass rallies, violence, and hysteria, and in the sudden widespread adoption of fashions and fads" (Soukhanov 1993:135). An Uncle, now deceased, was the ceo of an imaging and technology firm, now part of Boeing, who worked closely with the CIA and military. After decades of watching their occasional schemes collapse in failure, he felt secure the world was safe from conspiracies, no matter how well financed, because: groups of people cannot keep secrets; and, the sort of people attracted to this type of aberrant behavior for greed or ideology, "couldn't plan a picnic", as he put it. Their narrow world view leaves them crippled and not much capable of dealing with the real world. People who have little control over their lives and have access to limited information are more likely to believe in the most fantastic things, which require grand and complicated theories to support. This is why such flight of fancy become especially popular in difficult economic times. Reality is fairly simple and often not to your liking. Large groups of people, uninterestingly predictable. Like those who believed the sun and planets revolved around the Earth, whose theory required additional complex epicycles and other elaborate explanations to support their increasingly untenable theory as more information became available. The explanation that the Earth and planets revolved around the sun made everything simple. No reality can ever be as tantalizing and delicious as the revelation of a something which is partially or completely false. It doesn't have to be weighed down by the constraints of actual facts, so can be new and revelatory. .